Page 8 of Don't Remind Me
I knelt in front of the baseboard below the window by my bed, a toothbrush in one hand and a spray bottle of cleaning solution in the other. “I can’t just sleep with him,” I said as I scrubbed out my frustration. “I have to work with him. And how would that go over with his family? He’s Alec’sbrother.”
Robin chuckled. “Yes, I heard. I’m not suggesting you marry the guy. And didn’t you say he didn’t even recognize you? His family would never know.”
I paused my scrubbing. “I’m not sure. It didn’t seem like he did.”
The look of confusion he’d worn as I stood there, hardly able to speak, certainly gave the impression he had no clue who I was besides the strange woman he was being forced to work with. And hewasbeing forced, of that I was sure. He’d been as blindsided to learn about the symposium as I’d been to see him.
“We only met once while Alec and I were together,” I explained. At a family Christmas party Alec’s parents had thrown over winter break my junior year of college.
Now that I thought about it, I wasn’t sure Jase and I had even been formally introduced. There was just an image of him in my mind, standing in front of a wooden staircase across a room full of Alec’s aunts and uncles, his arms crossed and eyes listless. His hair had been longer then, falling across his forehead in careless waves instead of the sharp cut it had now, just long enough on top to grip with your fingers.
Not that I’d be doing that.
“Do you think I should tell him?” I asked Robin as I shuffled on my knees to the next section of the baseboard.
“Why would you?”
“To explain why I was the most awkward a person could possibly be today?”
“Or you could just ignore it and move on. For all you know, telling him might make thingsmoreawkward.”
A solid point. And I could totally act normal around him from here on out. It was just the surprise of seeing anyone tied to Alec that threw me off today. I’d be fine now.
One hundred percent fine.
I glanced up to see how much of the baseboards I had left, then took stock of the anxious buzz still churning its way through my ribs like a chainsaw.
Maybe I’d clean the oven next.
On Monday afternoon,I walked through the doors of Ardena determined to ignore the fact that Jase was Alec’s brother. It held no relevance to me. Alec was in my past, and Jase was just one of the many people whose help I needed to pull off what would hopefully be a wildly successful event.
The fact that my apartment was the cleanest it had been in the six months I’d lived there also held no relevance to the situation.
Goose bumps broke out over my legs as the cool air from the AC hit the skin below my shorts. I rolled down the sleeves of my blazer as I approached the bar, searching the room for Jase.
A young woman in a white chef jacket emerged from the doorway at the far end of the bar that I assumed led to the kitchen. Her blond hair was pulled back in a ponytail and tucked under a white cap, and bright tattoos decorated the cool-beige skin of her forearms to where they disappeared beneath her short sleeves. The moment she spotted me, she paused, eyes widening before she turned and hurried back the way she’d come.
Before I could make sense of it, Jase strode through the same doorway, shrinking the room to nothing with his commanding presence. I clasped the pendant of one of my necklaces and tugged it along its chain as he headed my way, ignoring the pounding of my heart.
The smile that formed on his lips was more relaxed than the one he’d given on Friday. It softened his whole face with an approachable ease that caught my breath in my throat.
He resembled Alec in so many ways.
Yet I caught subtle differences in how he moved, in the hardness of his jaw, in the definition of his forearms. It was all too much, too confusing for my mind and body to process.
“Hey, welcome back.”
His voice was deeper than Alec’s. Fuller. For whatever reason, my brain found that worth noting.
“Come in and sit down. You want a drink?” he asked, hand hovering over the cooler behind the bar.
I snapped out of my daze and slid onto the stool closest to the door, looping my bag over the hook beneath the counter and pulling out my event binder.
“Sparkling water, if you have it? Or tap is fine.” Look at me go, almost a complete sentence. And spoken at a normal register too.
Jase ducked down and grabbed a carafe from a shelf beside the cooler, then brought it over to a fancy-looking fountain with two nozzles. He filled the carafe from the nozzle on the left and headed back to where I sat, grabbing a water glass on the way, his every movement fluid. He set the glass in front of me and filled it from the carafe, which he then placed on the bar beside me. Bubbles rose in the clear liquid, quickly condensing the surface of the glass.
“You guys have sparkling water ontap?” I asked.
